Use cases are used to elicit software requirements from the point of view of the user of a system. Their prevalence in requirement specification has been noticeable ever since the onset of agile programming techniques. Within Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) projects however, business process models are used for capability analysis and gap detection. Business process models present a global view of the system and hence are more suited for gap detection. Therefore, in practice both these forms of requirements continue to be useful and coexist. Often in big software projects and in distributed development environment such coexisting requirement specifications can grow out of synch. Out of synch requirement specifications can be a major source of requirement errors that lead to, eventually, catastrophic software failures.
A few approaches to the translation of business use cases to a graphical notation such Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) or Unified Modeling Language (UML) Activity Diagrams have been reported. Gutierrez et al. describe an approach in J. J. Gutierrez, C. Nebut, M. J. Escalona, M. Mej'ias, and I. M. Ramos., Visualization of use cases through automatically generated activity diagrams, In MoDELS '08: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, pages 83-96, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008, Springer-Verlag. Their process accepts use cases defined using an existing template and translates the various concepts in the use case domain to relevant concepts in UML activity diagrams. This approach is essentially a one-to-one mapping between the use case template and an activity diagram. The approach does not produce an end-to-end business scenario. In this approach, each step defined in a use case flow is transformed into an activity in a diagram using the complete text as a label.
Lubke describes another approach in D. Lubke, “Transformation of use cases to epc models”, In EPK, pages 137-156,2006, and in D. Lubke, K. Schneider, and M. Weidlich, “Visualizing use case sets as bpmn processes”, pages 21-25, September 2008. This method translates a use case defined in an existing template into an EPC representation (Event Process Chains). Similar to the previous approach by Gutierrez, this approach consists of a one-to-one mapping between a various elements of predefined use case templates to the relevant elements of EPC. The author uses the pre- and post-conditions defined as textual strings to derive an end-to-end scenario. The author (with other colleagues) has used the same approach to generate BPMN models from use case descriptions.
All these approaches do not analyze the use case text to extract any semantic information and also rely on literal string matching to perform end-to-end scenario creation. This could lead to several usability errors in the form of cluttered diagrams and lack of flexibility for the business analyst in terms of describing the use case content. Further, an approach based on using pre- and post-conditions on use cases indicates end-to-end scenarios which are feasible but may lead to scenarios which are not desired by a business analyst.